It appears that EA will be rather focusing on Battlefront, the Star Wars themed game, and the next one will be both "much bigger" and "much more exciting", which was something that was a big drawback of the first Battlefront.

Of course, EA still plans to release those four expansion packs but we do not know any future plans for the franchise.

Hopefully, this also means that EA will have something special in store for future Battlefield titles as they certainly both surprised everyone and made a great hit by using the World War I.

The director of the final installment in the sequel to the original George Lucas trilogy from 1977 wants to film parts of his epic space opera in actual space, a new panel discussion from the 2016 Sundance Film Festival suggests.

Colin Trevorrow will succeed both J.J Abrams (Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, 2015) and Rian Johnson (Star Wars Episode VIII, 2017) as the director of the newer trilogy's last film, Star Wars Episode IX, set to release sometime in 2019. Like episodes 7 and 8 before it, the director says he also wants to shoot the 9th movie using real film and not digital cameras.

"I could never shoot Star Wars on anything but [film] because it's a period film: It happened a long time ago," Trevorrow said Thursday at a panel at the Sundance Film Festival. "The only place where I tend to not be able to attach myself entirely to something shot digitally is when that's a period film. There's something in my brain that immediately says, 'Well, they didn't have video cameras then.'"

Trevorrow, who also directed the recent hit Jurassic World (2015), says he has also already pitched the idea of filming in space. "Is it possible for us to shoot IMAX film plates in actual space for Star Wars?," he asked during the panel session. Some suggest he may have been referring to Journey to Space (2015), a 45-minute film by Giant Screen Films about NASA and other communities in space — mostly using recycled footage from 2002's IMAX epic, Space Station in 3D.

Very little is currently known about Star Wars Episode IX, other than its 2019 release date, Trevorrow's involvement as director and that the screenplay will be written by Episode VIII director Rian Johnson.

On January 12th, Entertainment Tonight asked Trevorrow about Rey, his favorite character from Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. His carefully-crafted response to any possible origin story giveaways can be found here.

During the 90-minute panel at the Sundance Film Festival, the interviewers touched on a variety of topics, including the topic of "motion smoothing" (currently advertised on newer televisions as 120Hz, 240Hz and 600Hz "Smooth Motion" and shunned by many moviewatchers, including ourselves). We were quite surprised to see that the topic brought a passioned response from both Christopher Nolan and Colin Trevorrow, with the latter saying “motion smoothing is the worst thing to happen to movies in recent history.”

The feature is often referred to as “the soap opera effect” and many have insisted it adds an "unauthentic" quality to film and TV content.

Nevertheless, we are quite pleased that Trevorrow has come out against smooth motion technology "enhancements" and wants to film Episode IX in space using actual film. We hope to hear more in the days and months ahead following Rian Johnson's Episode VIII filming progression.

EA's Star Wars Battlefront has sold 12 million copies since its launch in November thanks to Disney's Star War's reboot.

Adding up the numbers and dividing by the number of Ewoks who can defeat the Empire with stone age weapons, Video game industry analyst Michael Pachter (via Forbes) has calculated that the game has generated approximately $660 million in revenue.

His figures are backed up by research analyst Evan Wilson, who estimates the game sold up to 13 million copies.

The game is based on the original 1977-1983 trilogy of films and does not have any references to the new film, although word on the street is that there may well be additional content based on it released for Battlefront some time in 2016.

The Force Awakens flick has been represented in the video game medium with a new playset for Disney Infinity 3.0, which was released alongside the film and did depict the events from it.

Pachter said that Disney Infinity's Star Wars games, which are (based on The Force Awakens and the Clone Wars animated TV series, have generated £200m in revenue during the latter part of 2015, putting it ahead of competing toys-to-life games Lego Dimensions and Skylanders.

Star Wars is cleaning up the pre-Christmas theatre but it appears that behind the scenes the dark side is cheering.

March Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made clear that Star Wars was using Nvidia technology to make the next Star Wars movie. Apparently most of it was rendered on Nvidia Quadro M6000 graphics cards although th CPUs were Intelish.

So far Nvidia’s marketing machine has not made much hay from what is an obvious marketing opportunity. This might be because one of them costs $4,950 so the green goblin is not going to sell many anyway.

Still AMD fanboys will probably complain that Disney should have waited for Zen to come out as they have been for the last year every time figures show that Nvidia is doing better. That is not saying that Nvidia is great, but at the moment AMD's CPU division could be beaten up by a couple of Ewoks on their way to collect their disability benefit. Of course if they called Zen, Jedi they might have had it out sooner.

The Force Awakens has been breaking domestic records, including the biggest single-day gross ($120.5 million), biggest Thursday preview ($57 million), best December debut and multiple IMAX records. Worldwide, it's estimated to rake in $517 million over its first five days.

Electronic Arts claims that its upcoming game line-up will be an "embarrassment of riches" next year.

EA COO Peter Moore told the Credit Suisse Technology, Media, and Telecom conference that EA games fans have a lot to look forward to in the year ahead..

"It's a little bit of an embarrassment of riches particularly in [fiscal year 2017], which commences for us on April 1, 2016. We've got some of our core franchises; a new Battlefield coming up, a new Mass Effect title coming up; we actually kick off the year with Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which we pushed out of FY 16 and into FY 17.

"And we also have Mass Effect Andromeda from our BioWare studio. And Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2 is shipping in Q4 of this [fiscal] year."

The new Battlefield is the only game mentioned here that EA has not talked much about beforet. EA has said only that it will be a military-style game. Details about Andromeda are thin on the ground too.

He didn't even mention any sports titles, not that we care very much. Moore did say that a new Titanfall game will be released sometime between April 1, 2016 through March 31, 2017.

Moore added that EA needs to have a look at its schedule to ensure games don't cannibalise each other. EA looks at the competition and formulates release plans accordingly.

"It's a high class problem to have," Moore said.

Still no word on Dragon Age, the last one was Dragon Age Inquisition, which launched in November 2014. We suspect that EA will be flat out working out ways to milk the arrival of Star Wars with shedloads of Battlefront sequels and an action-adventure game.

Fruity Cargo cult Apple has forced the Swiss company behind the face capture for Star Wars to join the dark side.

Zurich-based startup Faceshift has provided face capture tech for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and also specialises in 3D sensors.

These are used to capture facial expressions in real time, data that can be used to make non-human characters in movies and games look more convincing. Obviously

Obviously the Apple Empire is hoping that it can make its technology look real and useful so it will stop being beaten up by Chinese Ewoks.

The technology behind Faceshift is innovative and is based around Realsense which is created by another Empire on the Darkside – Intel.

At the time of the buyout, the outfit was working on consumer software that allows Skype users to set a real-time avatar for video chats. We guess this will not be seen on real technology and will only be seen on Apple messaging gear.

Apple has not confirmed why it purchased Faceshift or even acknowledged the deal. Several Faceshift employees are now said to be working directly for Apple.

HP Empire is hoping to strike back and has released a new Skylake laptop to go with the "The Force Awakens" flick.

The laptop custom chassis with plenty of Windows 10. It can made the Kessel Run benchmark in less than twelve parsecs. It does not really look like a hunk of junk either.

Still it is supposed to be more a tool for the Sith Lord who has everything.

It's done out in a black and dark grey distressed looking design, with touches including images of Stormtroopers on the keyboard. The keyboard itself being backlit with red lighting.

The touchpad looks like the X-Wing Star Fighter Guidance System, which is curiously appropriate as I always turn off touchpad when a voice in my head says "use the mouse" Nick.

As you might expect it is full of Star Wars themes with custom wallpapers, screensavers, and sound effects. Although we would have liked to see a plug in USB drive which looks like an R2 unit. It would not have to do anything it would just be cool.

It is a 15.6-inch display is a full HD affair (with an optional touchscreen), and the machine is powered by Intel's Skylake Core i5 or i7 processors, with battery life being a claimed seven hours.The laptop also boasts 12GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of hard drive storage, and you can go with integrated graphics or join the dark side and get discrete Nvidia GeForce 940M GPU on board.

HP's Star Wars Special Edition notebook also has an optical drive, with dual speakers and audio tuned by B&O Play (Bang & Olufsen).

Although we knew it was coming sometime in October, EA and DICE have announced that the Star Wars Battlefront open beta will run from October 8th to October 12 and be available on the PC, Xbox One and Playstation 4.

According to the blog post, the Star Wars Battlefront open beta will include Walker Assault on Hoth, Drop Zone on Sullust and Survival Mission on Tatooine game modes. The open beta will allow the team at DICE to test various aspects of the game as well as the online infrastructure. DICE also noted that players might experience interruptions in the gameplay during this beta phase.

The earlier details Companion app will be only available via the official website and feature strategic card game Base Command that will allow you tuo unlock Star Cards, weapons and other things from the game as well as let you check out you stats, game progression, customize load-outs and more.

All players will be limited to level five cap and stats and progression will not be carried over to the final game.

Those coming from the PC will be able to pre-load the game from Origin as of October 7th. The Playstation 4 beta will be available at the PSN Store while the Xbox One can be found at Xbox Live Marketplace.

Be sure to mark those days and in case you can't take a few sick days off from work, bear in mind that October 10th and 11th are weekend days.

EA/DICE has announced that the beta phase for Star Wars: Battlefront will be available in October on PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One.

According to EA's new blog update, the beta of Star Wars: Battlefront will include the earlier seen 20 vs. 20 Walker Assault mode in the Battle of Hoth. In case you missed it, the Walker Assault mode is a 40-player multiplayer battle featuring AT-ATs, Y-Wings Bomber strikes as well as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker as hero characters.

In the same blog update, EA also noted that there will be a couple of new game modes, including a new multiplayer mode called the Drop Zone, which should be revealed in the coming weeks, as well as the earlier seen co-op survival mission on Tatooine.

Unfortunaetly, EA did not announce any details regarding the precise release date or any information on how to be a part of the beta phase, but did promise that we will hear more about it soon.

As teased earlier, DICE has unveiled a new Star Wars Battlefront game mode during Gamescom 2015, the Fighter Squadron mode.

As expected, this 20-player game mode will focus on ship battles and some rather impressive gameplay action. The released trailer shows that you will be able to take control of plenty Rebel ships, including A-Wing and X-Wing, as well as Imperial Tie Fighter and Tie Interceptor. The trailer also shows special ships including Millennium Falcon and Boba Fett's Slave I ship.